chatboxes

[sagebrush]

Okay... so I have a cute little chatbox, and that's all I want, a cute little chatbox for fans to write their assorted dribble in.  However, the one I have now is hosted god knows where, and the archives part has been hacked into.  So.... I'm thinking I need a different one, preferably one that's more secure.  Any suggestions?

[Xepher]

There's a ton of them that don't rely on a third-party website. A big list is at http://php.resourceindex.com/Complete_Scripts/Chat/Shoutbox/ and google has plenty of results when searching "php shoutbox" too. http://www.shoutpro.com/ looks pretty decent.

[sagebrush]

Hmm, yeah, ShoutPro looks good.  I used to have one that looked a lot like that, but it magically broke one day... as things do... >.>  I had several others with varying degrees of success, hence the request for a recommendation.

[Miluette]

I'm so picky about these things that I never found one tailored to what I wanted that was better than the third-party hosting shoutboxes. For example, one that doesn't use iframes. D: One that'd manefest something like the text-only Twitter thing. Makes me wish I were a scripter.

Ohh, this one looks nice actually.

[sagebrush]

Hmm.. is there one that has a math problem spam stopper?

[Miluette]

Oh... it looks like that one doesn't have anything like that. D: Poo. POO I say, on all these free tagboards! Each forgetting vital things that would actually make them useful!

On another note, every time I try to post on your kind of shoutbox, Sagebrush, it tells me I have cookies deactivated. *kicks tagboard in the face* No I don't have cookies off, I couldn't live without cookies! Back in my days of tagboard raiding, Myshoutbox would drive me nuts. ;x;

[sagebrush]

The first one I had was Flatfort, and it was good... until it stopped working, and the creator didn't support it.

[Miluette]

Last one I used, uhh forgot what it was, but it kept generating really annoying popunders on my pages for some reason. May have been a different issue with my computers (it happened when I clicked inputs on Dictionary.com too, but I have no idea why that should have also happened on my mac), but it started having obnoxious advertising lines in it too. Or maybe that was the one I used before it... I'm sure I used every major third party tagboard at some point. c_c!

Oh yeah, it was cbox. Blah.

[sagebrush]

I found Flatfort again.

Edit: Flatfort seems... buggy.  Although it worked okay the first time I installed it (on my other host).  I just got weirdness happening when I then moved it here.  I think it was due to clicking things in a different order or something to get into the admin stuff.  Or my computer is tired now and won't refresh.

Anyway, Flatfort does work, on the user end, if the back panel is a bit odd.  The old version I had didn't even have an admin section, so I expect the guy is still working things out.  If anyone wants to see it, it's on my site.  I modified the colors, dimensions, and removed the website blank on the form so people won't sneak in porno links.  Oh, just tested it, and it doesn't allow html in the message.  BBcode is okay, though.

I like Flatfort because it's the only one I've found so far with a built in captcha of any kind.  I don't know what I'm doing enough to mod/write/install my own captcha without help.  I'm not sure how effective the six character one he's got is in the long term... but it is better than the previous one, which was only three characters and included lowercase, which made it hard to tell 1 from l or I, especially if you use Arial.  I think pictures or a "Are you human?" question, or a math puzzle might be better, but then in a chatbox space is an issue, and you don't want it to be too annoying, either.

[Miluette]

Thanks for the link. <3

If I can get this one working the way I want, I'm gonna reestablish a chatbox on one of my sites. Yay!